At Rams Bazaar you can buy Indian fenugreek seeds and African sumac, Nepalese Wai Wai noodles and Turkish honey. If you want the whole curry leaves from Hawaii, they’ll have to be ordered.

“Our concept was to have a bit of a fusion,” said Kanta Prasai, who helps her husband Niroj Bhattarai run this new food market on Elizabeth Street, west of campus.

Both originally from Nepal, Prasai and Bhattarai wanted to open a supermarket in their current hometown, selling representative foods from many countries, but mostly Asian, Middle Eastern and Mediterranean.

“(The products) depend on what the demand is and what students ask for,” said Prasai.

Since Rams Bazaar opened in April, she has seen a range of customers come in, many of them students, but also families and curious neighbors, asking for their own or other countries’ traditional foods. She said she hopes to keep at least one popular food in-stock from as many countries as possible.

Inside the small store, foods are divided by product, rather than by country. One shelving unit features noodles, another holds sauces. In the center of the room are wrapped candies, with mango, lychee and ginger flavorings, and Japanese cream-filled cookies, shaped like tiny Koalas. (These I remembered instantly from childhood, when Emiko came as an exchange student to stay with our family.)

Prasai said she and her husband try to offer the ingredients to make traditional meals from scratch, and also to enjoy them reheated. An entire wall is filled with bags of spices; and in the front of the store, a heap of flours for baking chapati (and other flatbreads) are piled. Packs of pre-made breads, mochi desserts and fermented soy beans sit in the freezer. A small fridge stores fresh lemongrass, Thai basil leaves, chives and mustard greens, Indian bitter gourds and okra.

Prasai said that many of the products are halal, or permissible by Muslim dietary law. A party-sized pack of Medjool dates, often eaten during the annual festival of Ramadan, are one of the store’s best-sellers, along with a glass jar of coriander (the plant whose leaves make cilantro) chutney. The most expensive item in the shop is an assortment of Turkish baklava, for $30.